How to Create a Brand Identity for Clients
Brand identity is how a business looks, sounds, and feels to the audience. It’s the combination of a color palette, logo, and tone of voice that comes together on a website and everywhere else a business shows up. You can offer client branding as a service alongside web design, whether a client already has pieces in place or needs to start from scratch.
Why brand identity matters for clients
A strong brand identity fosters trust, emotional connection, and brand loyalty, and can lead to long-term scalability for your client’s business. By establishing yourself as a branding expert, you can guide your client through developing a cohesive online presence, strengthen the impact of their website, and enhance the overall user experience to improve conversion.
When explaining why branding matters to a client, highlight the following benefits:
It differentiates their business from competitors
It quickly communicates their business personality and shapes customer perception
It establishes an emotional connection with visitors and promotes positive brand association
It drives conversion and profitability for their business
Even when clients understand the benefits of having a strong brand identity, they may not know how to go about developing one. That’s where you come in. As you step into the role of branding expert, you’ll want to incorporate a process to move things along.
Step 1: Ask open-ended questions
Open-ended questions reveal how your client wants to be perceived, beyond a simple list of products or services. They deepen your understanding of your client’s needs and pain points, and give you real language to build their brand identity around.
Here are a few sample questions to add to your onboarding workflow:
If your brand or business were a person, who would they be?
As abstract as this question may seem, it can push your client past terminology and analytics and toward the essence of the brand. It also prompts them to share their mission statement alongside actual characteristics that can give you a sense of what their tone of voice and overall brand personality should be.
What would you like people to associate your brand with?
At this point, they can tell you what perceptions or emotions they want potential customers to walk away with when they experience the brand. This may prompt them to offer examples of other brands they resonate with, which you can pull inspiration or insight from while building their site.
What do you currently like or dislike about your brand identity?
This is where a client can point to elements they align with and any challenges they face with their brand identity. In addition to identifying elements you should tackle, their response will also tell you what requires immediate attention and what can be handled later.
Step 2: Fill in the gaps
Once you’ve gathered relevant information about the brand story, the real client branding work begins. Here’s where you’ll determine what new elements you need to create and update. For instance, if your client already has their brand name and logo, work together to choose typography that fits their existing brand personality, a color palette that both matches their logo and incorporates the desired customer sentiment, and imagery that tells their story.
Guide them on how to establish a compelling tone of voice, use language that resonates with visitors, and optimize site copy for SEO and AEO purposes.
Step 3: Encourage continuity and consistency
Creating a solid brand identity is an ongoing and iterative process. While your time working with a client may be limited, you can set them up to continue developing their content and business around the elements you’ve established. The overall goal is to ensure key elements are represented on every surface as they interact with their audience.
An effective way to do this is to encourage them to deliver consistent messaging across all platforms. From the website’s content to social media posts and marketing campaigns, maintaining a unified brand voice strengthens brand recall and cultivates strong brand association.
Social media serves as an open line of communication between your client and their audience and can direct traffic to their website. As such, followers should get a sense of the brand identity from their first interaction with the brand, inviting them to explore more by visiting your client’s website.
Make client branding part of your services
Offering client branding alongside web design expands what you can do for new and existing clients. A well-defined brand identity lays the foundation for future growth and scalability, and it gives you a service that keeps them coming back.
This article was originally published on Aug 1, 2023. It has since been updated.
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